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Penske's Rolling Stone Grab Was A Deal At $51mm


Most people think that Rolling Stone stopped being relevant around 1980. At that point, rock had become corporate; disco was still in play, and punk rock, a music genre on the rise embodied everything that mainstream wasn’t. For Rolling Stone, mainstream was EXACTLY where they had moved. With no big new rock names to showcase on their covers the magazine shifted to Hollywood and became a promotional platform for studios and networks. Frankly, that’s where their baby boomer readership had moved as well. And so charted their future would then become. Rolling Stone became the written record of a generation.

Today, it’s not only the perils of print that have threatened the brand’s relevance. It’s the lost connection to a youth culture. Their efforts to reclaim that bond have been often awkward and ineffective (consider RS Country). That said, Rolling Stone is only one hit away from becoming a relevant force within the world of music. That’s what Jay Penske is betting on, and from this perspective it’s a well-placed wager.

Rolling Stone once provided a vast canvas for marketers of all kind to promote their wares. Whether it was an artist on the front cover who inside would speak to new release, or Ford on the back cover promoting the new Mustang the oversized print format was a powerful billboard. In a digital age, the “cover of the Rolling Stone” can still have impact – it just needs to be augmented by a strategic plan that leverages the strength of the brand through multiple pathways.

What Penske can now do is make the Rolling Stone digital experience one that is dynamic and engaging. The competitive set, from Pitchfork to Uncut has languished as well. They all offer up a flat one dimensional experience through their various platforms that neither captures the energy of the space they cover nor offers a path to discovery that has utility and ease of use. The field is open to create a community where people explore, sample, buy, share, collect, opine, and inhabit. Music is a larger space than it has ever been. Today no one is dependent upon a label to gain scale, and outlets like Rolling Stone are no longer confined to operate within a boundary that they don’t define. Just because a band isn’t part of a label’s weekly release schedule doesn’t mean that they don’t have a following large enough to warrant a nod from Rolling Stone.

Rolling Stone can become a label, an ecommerce bonanza, a live digital music concert venue, a recording studio, an education platform, an agent, an internet radio provider, an OTT powerhouse, a marketplace for fans to buy and sell, a social community for all who just love rock and nothing more. Imagine this. A reader discovers a new band through RS, decides to learn guitar and begins to take online lessons with Rolling Stone on a guitar he bought through their online store. He is coached through additional online education on refinish his songwriting skills. Writes a few songs and uses RS studio software to record his demo which he publishes on their platform. It gets steady play on their radio platform and he gets courted to join an established rocker on the road, a contract negotiated by RS’s artist relations team. RS manages him from this point forward – everything from his bookings to his social outreach. Full circle with revenue touch points everywhere.

The brand can be freed of the inside baseball hand shake agreements made to pals of the past that found aging rocker after aging rocker on its covers. Even the print product can begin to explore custom publishing, offering special edit sections, tailored to a specific reader’s own interest and needs. The data that can be gleaned through the process of this kind of creation may well become the bed rock of Rolling Stone’s future financial stability.

What lies ahead for Rolling Stone is exciting. At $51 million Jay Penske could probably just milk the Straight Arrow book back list and get his money back. However, I’m sure the ball he is playing is a lot longer. For fans and soon to be fans, we are all lucky that in the end he held the winning hand.


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